A lot of forums I used to be on kept a members-only chat/offtopic section that wasn’t publically searchable. It’s not just the “no Google”, it’s the “must be a registered user” that makes this a community.

A lot of forums I used to be on kept a members-only chat/offtopic section that wasn’t publically searchable. It’s not just the “no Google”, it’s the “must be a registered user” that makes this a community.

I think the Mainalnd should move to the Forums. The search feature on the Mainland is not as good as the search feature here. If I want to see if something was recently discussed in the forums, I can do that. If I want to see if something was discussed recently on the Mainland, I can’t do that.

JGLB, I am sensitive to the privacy concerns of the Loungers. It’s difficult for anyone to make a sensible decision without seeing possible alternatives.

The design of the forums is essentially the default EE forum template with some color changes. It’s not particularly pretty or easily changed (the underlying template is a confusing mess). After the main site redesign is finished, I will spend a little time mocking up a potential redesign or two for the Lounge. If I can come up with something more functional that works for both computer and mobile users, people will support the move. If I can’t, the Lounge can stay where it is.

Wow, disabling signatures and avatars made a huge difference, although there’s still a ton of whitespace. If there were a way to get everything in that blue bar into the little box on the left side, that would be a lot cleaner (although that creates problems for really short posts).

There is a quote function on the mainland, and I wonder how difficult it would be to replace the giant quotes with a username. For all I know, there might be a tag for that.

Wow, disabling signatures and avatars made a huge difference, although there’s still a ton of whitespace. If there were a way to get everything in that blue bar into the little box on the left side, that would be a lot cleaner (although that creates problems for really short posts).

There is a quote function on the mainland, and I wonder how difficult it would be to replace the giant quotes with a username. For all I know, there might be a tag for that.

I don’t use the quote function for user quotes, only for quotes from TFA.

The trouble with the Lounge quoting system is that people get lazy, and just hit ‘quote’, resulting in enormous ziggurats of conversations that make reading more difficult, paritcularly for mobile users. Moving this system to the Main Site would be a disaster for readability, because you’d be multiplying the problem from a situation with about twenty people having a conversation at any given moment to possibly forty or more. The ‘thread velocity’ on the Main Site can be much more rapid than in the Forums, simply because more people are involved.

Signature

The Christology of Cormac McCarthy—\“Don\‘t put it in your pocket, sir. It\‘s your lucky quarter. Don\‘t put it in your pocket. Anywhere [but] not in your pocket. Where it\‘ll get mixed in with the others and become just a coin. Which it is.\”